We shouldn't be fooled by BP's climate claims

At BP’s AGM today, the company will be under fire from shareholders
over how its plans square with the Paris climate goals of limiting global
warming to avoid climate breakdown. In its response, BP’s line is that its current
strategy is already consistent with the Paris climate goals. But this is spectacularly
far-fetched – in reality BP’s plans are a recipe for climate disaster.

We’ve crunched the numbers and found that more than half of
BP’s $140 billion planned investment in oil and gas over the next decade is
more than we can afford to burn if we’re to avoid the worst impacts of climate
change. This is because any production from any
new oil or gas fields – those that aren’t yet producing – is incompatible
with that goal. We simply cannot afford any new extraction.

Based on the latest climate science, we found that the
production of oil and gas needs to drop by around 40% over the next decade if
we’re to meet the ambition of the UN climate agreement. This is in line with
the headline finding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
report on 1.5°C; global emissions need to fall by 45% by 2030, reaching
net zero by 2050.

BP, on the other hand, reckon that spending tens of billions
of dollars on new oil and gas is not a problem. They have produced their own
model of how they think the world can tackle climate change and, according to
them, by 2030 oil production only needs to drop 4%, and the world can afford to
burn 16% more gas than we do today.

So, how do BP claim that carrying on burning fossil fuels is
climate-friendly? Underneath their shiny looking modelling they rely on a magic
technology that means the world can set fossil fuels on fire and release no
climate-changing CO2 – Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). This technology
strips the CO2 out of things like power stations, allowing them to
be stored, often underground – rather than released into the atmosphere.

And BP are relying on this magic technology a lot. Their
climate models relies on CCS increasing by over 14,000% over the next 20 years.
Based on the scale of existing CCS plants, this would require building another 2,500
plants – opening one new plant every three days for the next 20 years. For
context, there are only 17 CCS plants in the world right now, and only two of
those have started operating in the last three years.

You don’t have to be a climate scientist or an engineer to
realise that those projections aren’t even close to realistic. The world’s
leading climate scientists in the IPCC have taken a look at CCS and found there
is significant uncertainty over its future, it has not become cheap enough to
be more widely deployed, and barely registers in governments’ plans to deliver
the Paris Agreement.

BP are claiming that they don’t have to change, because this
magic technology will save us in the future. In the meantime, they are
investing tens of billions of dollars in new oil and gas production. Those rigs
will keep on pumping fossil fuels for decades to come, pushing us towards a
radically changed climate. By now, we should all know what that means – more
flooding, more heatwaves, more natural disasters – all taking an enormous toll
on the natural world and human life.

Shareholders are increasingly demanding that big oil
companies like BP line up with the world’s ambition to tackle climate change. At
the AGM today
they need to keep that pressure up.

But investors shouldn’t be fooled by BP’s claims -
ultimately the only way to avoid climate breakdown is to keep oil and gas in
the ground.